Holiday email marketing strategy

8 Creative Holiday Email Marketing Strategies to Prevent Spam Reports & Maximize Engagement

With the holiday season just around the corner and it being one of the most lucrative times for businesses, you need to plan effectively. This is the time when all marketers get set and ready for launching the most attention-grabbing and sales-driven email marketing campaigns. But with all the brands aiming at launching the best campaigns to yield the highest revenue, holiday marketing success will not come easy! 

Here we have created this ultimate holiday email marketing guide with all the creative ideas and tips along with dos and don’ts to implement in your holiday email campaigns to launch those with flying colors. We have selected these following tips which especially help marketers to achieve better results in all key parameters including email delivery, opens, clickthrough rates, engagement, ROI and many other areas. 

1. Enhance interactivity of your holiday emails to make those more vivid

Incorporating interactivity is a great idea to add pizzazz and holiday feel to holiday emails. Attention-grabbing and holiday-themed interactive elements in your emails can easily entice your target audience’s attention during the holidays. You can consider various types of interactive elements that will not add much to the weight of the elements nor will prolong the loading time of emails but will help you to make your emails noticeable during the peak season. GIFs, embedding videos or adding thumbnails of videos [with the link of the video in the text], sliders, holiday countdown timers, rotating banners, etc. are some of these interactive elements will get you stand out amidst thousands of emails in your subscribers’ inboxes. 

2. Segment audience and target based on user profiles

Identifying your customers’ and prospects’ needs and preferences is vital when you are aiming to attract maximum engagement from your target audiences during peak season like holidays. Personalization is the key to connecting with your customer segment; that’s why understanding and grouping them into the right segment based on their interests, previous engagement data, purchase history and demographics are essential to create perfectly personalized emails. Relevant and perfectly tailored holiday emails will attract more engagement and thus, more conversions.

3. Make sure all holiday emails are mobile-ready

With most of the subscribers checking their emails on mobile devices including smartphones and tablets, it is imperative to use a responsive email template for your holiday emails to ensure they are not only supported, but perfectly optimized and rendered on mobile devices. Make sure you A/B test all your holiday emails on all platforms and sizes of mobile devices as well as mobile email clients before and after launching emails to avoid any design glitches or distorted views.

4. Send real-time updates to win customers’ trust

Emails with real-time updates, information and live content work a great deal in engaging your target audience. Hence, we recommend incorporating live updates which may reflect real-time changes that occur in the inventory, real-time shopping cart notices, and also location-specific and date-specific offers which may change based on the number of days left till the holidays. When real-time content based on contextual information is delivered at the right time, with the right messages you can win your customers’ trust and build customer loyalty for a long time to come. 

5. Be more customer-driven than brand-driven

During the holidays, marketers can be more winning if they choose to compromise their brand-centric approaches and adopt a more customer-focused email marketing approach. That being said, brands need to focus on a customer-centric (or customer-first) email marketing strategy that will solely emphasize on delivering better customer experience, rather than designing your emails just for aesthetics. Keep the customer in mind and send them content they wish to see during the holidays.

6. Proper planning is the key to holiday email success

As marketers, you need to have a solid plan for your holiday emails early. Creating a plan well in advance can free an ample amount of time for marketers to plan for last-minute changes, optimization and improvements. Hence, marketers need to begin all the planning, resource allocation and execution process early and also start sending emails as well to test and optimize based on initial holiday email responses. 

7. Combine holiday email marketing activities with social media

To enhance the results of your customer outreach with holiday email, reaching the same segment of people via different social media channels where they are most active and engage with similar brands and content. Target them on those social media channels by sharing your holiday offers that you are also sharing via holiday emails so that even if they miss out on your emails, they will still be aware of your holiday offers and information you are sharing with your holiday emails. You can also share posts that encourage people to subscribe for your holiday emails and newsletters to expand your subscriber base. Make sure you start these practices early to accumulate your subscriber base you can use for your holiday email campaigns. 

8. Develop better email strategies with machine learning

One great technique of devising more ROI-driven and customer-focused holiday email marketing strategy is to harness the technology of machine learning. Various benefits of leveraging machine learning technology include continuous A/B testing, consistent A/B testing, creating different email variants for different segment of audience, improved personalization, generating product recommendations based on recipients’ interests and buying history, email trigger when prospects abandon shopping carts among many others. Implementing a machine learning technology with hyper-personalization will keep your brand’s holiday emails way ahead of the competition during the peak season by increasing your reach, automating your email messages and thereby, improving your communication with customers and customer engagement.

Basic guidelines on how to target your recipients during holidays – 

  • Plan free gifts, special coupons and discounts for existing customers to make them feel special by reminding them of products they left in the shopping cart or viewed
  • Remind customers from previous years by updating them on new products and special offers such as free shipping for no minimum value orders, and offers that are available for a limited time period. Limited period offers and specially designed promotional offers create urgency and motivates buying decisions.
  • Include videos of how your product or service works in your emails to speed up the sales 
  • Strike a consistency throughout your emails that are relevant to the product or topic your email message is talking about so that your subject lines, images used, and links would be relevant to the email copy. 
  • Create emails for special product notifications such as special holiday collections, back-in-stock notifications, etc. Distinguish between in-store and online sales and highlight your best deals
  • You can launch combined holiday email campaigns for Cyber Monday and Black Friday along with sending them reminder emails before and after each day has passed. 
  • Launch Christmas campaigns early and keep subscribers updated of your holiday deals by scheduling and automating those well in advance. 
  • Treat customers with as much as possible within your budget with last minute limited offers, gift cards, e-gifts, and after-Christmas sales on 26th of December.

Do you want to these holiday email marketing ideas? Or in case, if you need more emails marketing design, delivery, optimization and other tips, do not hesitate to ask for it – simply drop a comment below with your email address and we can reach out soon!

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